Oh, – sorry. Wrong class. My bad.

Okay, what did I learn over the course of the semester in Professional Writing? The importance of time management. Really. I didn’t say I “learned” time management, I just said I learned the importance there of. Technology is our friend – when you finally figure out what in tar nations you are doing! New Media. Great, ain’t it?

The “new” New Media I learned this semester:

BLOGS: Awesome! They let you write about what interests YOU and share it with the world. Everybody should Blog.

TWITTER: I have just one thing to say about Twitter: I’m hooked!!! And Dr. Hara, it’s all YOUR fault! But I l.i.k.e it!  It’s a new challenge. 140-characters to say “What’s happening?’ Go!

GOOGLE DOCS: Is it called Google “Docs” because of documents or because we can share documents and “doctor” ‘em up? Hmmm… things to ponder…

SCRIBED: Maybe later…I’ll share my art with you, my writing, my photos, my poems, oh, wait! – I don’t write poems. Okay, no poems.

DELICIOUS: Ice cream sundae. That’s what this makes me think about. But I really like that I have all my bookmarks in one place. This could come in handy. (You think?!?!)

WIKIPEDIA: I have posted to my sandbox in Wikipedia. I am now a Wikipedian. Officially. Cool bean-os!

FLICKR: Still too intimidating for me. I need to change the lens on my camera. Check back later.

TWITPIC: I liked it. Works for me. Very idiot-proof. I did it ALL by myself. Didn’t even read the directions. See? Idiot-proof.

RSS READERS: Put it on my summer reading list. I’ll get to it. Promise.

PECHA KUCHA: Presentation-Fun unrestrained! Remember: You don’t NEED that many pictures! You only have 20-seconds per slide. Take a deep breath. Ready? Go! No, wait, no, go, n-. Awww, man! Let me start over. KEY: Practice.

PREZI: Blew me away! Seriously. L-o-v-e i-t!

“Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-… That’s all, folks!” Well, not really…

Lauren and I are still trying to get the information we need from Sara Hill, at Bokenkamp Children’s Shelter to write-up a biography for the personal accomplishment/lifetime achievement profile for their volunteer who has been with them for over fifteen years. Hopefully we can get that going tomorrow. Getting anxious.

The brochure for The Salvation Army is coming along. In the process of redesigning the layout and adding new photos. As part of our Professional Writing class today, we showed our “work in progress” to our fellow classmates for their critique and comments. We received some very good suggestions. Thank you!

Stay tuned for updates on this continuing project.

I received an Email from Laura Stafford of The Salvation Army. It turns out she is in Atlanta, GA. I told her we had contacted the local chapter and were already formulating a plan to help them with their needs. She said that would be alright with her since she didn’t really have anything she specifically needed right now.

Lauren met with Sara Hill, Bokenkamp Children’s Shelter representative. There was another surprise there. As it happens, she was a former volleyball player from TAMUCC and she was very excited to hear that we chose to work with them. They have several projects they would like us to help them organize. They are interested in having us do a newsletter and a personal accomplishment profile for a volunteer who has been with them many years. We will be meeting with them next week to gather the information.

Lauren received an EMail response from Laura Stafford from The Salvation Army whom she contacted last week with regard to the project. She expressed an interest and was very excited about the opportunity to work with us.

I will be meeting with Roel Sanchez from the local Salvation Army office to discuss project ideas. Lauren is unable to attend the meeting with me because she is stuck in softball practice until 4 p.m. (She’s not happy about that.)

Lauren received a call from the Bokenkamp Children’s Shelter representative. They will be able to meet with us next week.

We have come up with a document to track our progress and updates on both projects for the two organizations that we are working with. This will help us to keep track of what work we’ve done and what still needs to be completed with regard to each organization. We are sharing these documents through Google Docs.

As part of our Professional Writing class, we are required to do a collaborative writing community project for a non-profit organization. The community collaborative project organization I chose is The Salvation Army. Lauren Iverson is my classmate who was kind enough to agree to work with me. Someone in class mentioned that Bokenkamp Children’s Shelter was also an option and that they needed some help getting several projects off the ground, so Lauren and I agreed to take them on as well.

We contacted representatives for both organizations to meet with them and discuss project ideas. So far we have only one confirmed a meeting with Roel from The Salvation Army for Thursday, April 8th. He expressed an interest in possibly having a brochure re-designed and updated.

We left messages for the representative from Bokenkamp and hope to hear from them soon.

Lauren and I have been discussing possibilities for the design of the brochure for The Salvation Army and looking up information to include in the brochure.

Since Lauren plays softball for TAMUCC, her schedule is quite hectic and challenging. I don’t live in town and I am only here two days out of the week so we have decided to do most of our collaboration via Google Docs, EMail, and text messages.

We did preliminary testing of our “collaboration through technology” strategy and it seems to be working well. Lauren has a softball game next week so she will not be class on Tuesday.

Much to his surprise, his students were actually okay with him asking them to turn off their computers in class. One of the experiments he tried was to have an online chat and a “traditional verbal discussion” going on at the same time. He noticed a strange thing happen: both of discussions diminished. He wondered why. His students informed him that “multitasking in class almost always means withdrawing attention from the teacher and other students.” This is definitely true! I have had the experience of being in class, listening to the lecture and writing notes while at the same time recording it. Inevitably, when I have gone back to hear the lecture again there were many things that I initially missed in my notes.

Another one of his experiment involved allowing only five students at a time to use their laptops. As soon as a sixth laptop popped open, he would ask all of them to shut down. “Mindfulness and norms, my students helped me to see,” Rheingold says, “are essential tools for those who would master the arts of attention.” Hmmm…I think that is something our professor is trying to get “us” students to see.

You’d be hard pressed to find someone in this day and age who knows nothing about computers and technology. After all, they are everywhere. Call them cell phones, smart phones or what you will, but the truth is they are computers. Computers you can use to make phone calls. Our media of communication has changed and is changing. In the article “Literacy and Technology Linked: The National Project to Expand Technological Literacy,” Cynthia Selfe stresses the increasing importance of the link between “literacy and technology.” And she wrote this article over ten years ago. If it was important then, it is critical now. Technology, literacy, and attention must find a way to co-exist in our everyday lives.

So, to quote Rheingold, “In the interest of not demanding too much of any reader’s online attention at one time…” — I bid you adieu!

Chris Anderson thinks so. In fact, in his article, “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” he talks about this crazy idea of giving stuff away – for free. A point reiterated in Malcolm Gladwell’s article, “Priced to Sell. Is free the future?” where he quotes Anderson as saying, “Give a product away, and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business…The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.” That was the cornerstone for King Gillette, of Gillette Razor fame, that made him, well, “king” of the disposable razor industry. Gillette thought that making disposable razors and giving them away would create a market for the blades these razors used, which were the real commodity. He was right. And “freeconomics” was born! We see it everywhere today: You get a free cell phone with the purchase of a 2-year contract, buy ink for your printer, you get a ream of paper free, “Buy one, get one free.” Then there’s H.E.B.’s “Loco” deals where you buy one thing and you get like a refrigerator-load of stuff for free! I love those.

The truth is, with so much outsourcing to countries that provide cheaper labor, like India, Egypt, and China (seems everything’s made in China these days), it really does come down to “Not too cheap to Meter, but too cheap to Matter.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of technology. A perfect example of this is Google. No one can argue their sheer magnitude, yet they give us, their users, many services for free. Who can compete? Oh, many have tried — no one has won. Google makes their money from advertisers. With the gargantuan number of traffic going through their site, who wouldn’t want to advertise on Google?

It seems that Facebook doesn’t think its users mind if they divulge certain information regarding their purchases. The article, “Naked in the ‘Nonopticon’” tells of how Facebook “used” a “social-advertising” program called “Beacon” to do just that. Sneaky? Yes. But because their users post personal information about themselves anyway, they didn’t think it was a big deal. Young people aren’t usually concerned with privacy because they live their life online, in front of the whole world. But as the article states, it is one thing for you, the user, to “choose” to share information, quite another for someone else to make that decision for you. There is a sense of a loss of control over one’s own life when something like this happens, a loss of privacy.

Just what is the “Nonopticon?” The Nonopticon, (opposite of the Panopticon) the article states, “describes a state of being watched without knowing it, or at least the extent of it. It goes on to say that companies such as Facebook, Google, ChoicePoint, and Amazon.com want for us to just “be ourselves” and do what comes naturally. In the meantime, they will record our every move, our likes and dislikes, our preferences, our “niches” so they can “exploit” and capitalize on them. Market segmentation.

It is rather disheartening when a company you put your trust in, betrays that trust thinking only of themselves and in how much money they will make. Alas, regardless of their trickery and blatant disregard for their user’s feelings, people continue to use Facebook. What does that say about us? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into people who ask me those four little words that have become so common place: “Are you on Facebook?” No, I am not. And after reading these articles, it is unlikely that I will be. For you see, even if there isn’t much that I can do about “Big Brother” keeping tabs on me, I still have one small bit of privacy that I can keep to myself — or at least try to — and that I don’t want to share with my “friends” in cyberspace. And THAT, I can control.

Well, a good place to start is the book by Keith Aoki, et al, “Tales From the Public domain: Bound by Law?” The book discusses the issue of copyright and what you, as an open media producer or artist, should know. Aside from the fact that this is a comic book-style publication, I thoroughly enjoyed it, but most importantly learned quite a bit of things I really had no idea about with regard to writing in the “Public Realm.” Things like Fair Use and Public Domain.

In reading this book, my creativity felt somewhat “bogged down” by all the legal aspects of all the “dos and don’ts” that I thought to myself: Is it even worth it? I’m sure many people would not hesitate to say it is. I still have to think about it. It seems that it all boils down to a “money” issue. It usually does in these cases. Money is a problem for many artists. The phrase, “starving artist” certainly was not referring to artists with money. Like it or not, creating art comes with a price tag. This book certainly makes dealing with all the legalities a lot easier to understand.

The issue of Privacy is a very different creature. Anders Albrechtslund argues in his article, “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance” that in the social context on online communities, privacy is many times surrendered — voluntarily. Albrechtslund quotes the chief security officer for PGP, an encryption software maker, Jon Callas as saying: “I am continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves.”

This is a place where people form “Eternal Friendships” Albrechtslund says. “Eternal” because the “digital trails” of you and your “friends” are permanently stored on servers. Everything you’ve ever shared, every conversation is stored. Indefinitely. Not exactly my idea of a “lasting friendship.”

There is a certain “trust” that develops within these communities. There is also a type of “surveillance” that goes on that we participate in when we are a part of these online communities that is “mutual and horizontal” in its nature. I understand that feeling from my participation in Twitter. Posting your 140-character “microblog” comment almost seems like you’re talking to yourself. Almost. Then someone hits the “Reply” button to your “Tweet.” Then you know others are “watching over.” But you’re okay with that. These people are your “friends.”

But what happens when you things a step further? Albrechtslund brings up the issue of geotagging and “mobile social software” (MoSoSo). Now people can associate time and location information to their “online social networks” making it easier to locate their “friends.” Obviously, this type of openness can have serious consequences when you’re dealing with teens that are so willing to share every aspect of their lives with their online “friends.” Is the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) really working? Oh, the spending of our taxes dollars! Where does it go?

While we may not know where our tax dollars go, Nicolas Carr’s article, ”Information wants to be free my ass” claims Gizmodo seems to know what we place our monetary value on: information. They invite us to “Do the math” on our monthly sources of information subscriptions like, to name a few:

-Internet service
-Cable TV service
-Cellular telephone service (voice, data, messaging)
-Landline telephone service
-Satellite radio
-Netflix
-Wi-Fi hotspots

Easily, these subscriptions can total up to several hundred dollars. He asks if we in fact are “unhealthily addicted to information” in the same manner as we are “addicted to fatty foods?”

Can you do without your electronic gizmos, gadgets, and service providers?

This brings me to Net Neutrality. With so many people using the Internet, it’s no wonder corporations want to cut us out of the profits, or should I say make huge profits for themselves and leave everybody else out? Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Internet as we know it, believes, “Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and now is the basis of a society we’ve built on the Internet.”

Full and free exchange of information. Isn’t that right Mr. President? ?

The availability and interactive nature of the W3 has made the creation of MUDs and other virtual worlds possible; worlds in which many people have found a new identity for themselves. Some of these identities are good, some bad – really bad. Take the story by Julian Dibblell, “A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a society.” This community created in a MUD world called LambdaMOO was faced with issue of dealing with a very disturbing cybercrime. This was something they had never dealt with before in their virtual world and the decision of what to do about it became the central issue. As a computer programmer, it is easy for to see ways around certain “things” but it all technical. This went beyond that, it involved the society acting as one. Debate naturally ensued. It was interesting to me to see what their final decision was. A society, whether real or virtual, seeks ultimately to preserve itself in that state in which it feels most “comfortable.” Of course, as a computer programmer I know that technically, there is always a way to do…anything! In a society, everyone is free to be who she/he wants to be – within a specified realm of possibilities. For those who do not conform, society is forced to find a way to “deal” with them. So it has been since the being of time. So it will continue until the end.

It used to be that only those who knew how to program computers could understand the protocols and all the technical jargon used to transmit and receive information through The World-Wide Web. Today, it seems most toddlers know how to use the World-Wide Web even before they start pre-school. Everybody wants in on the action, or media. In “Everyone is a Media Outlet,” Clay Shirky talks about the “mass amateurization.” What was previously reserved only for professionals can now be done by the average person, little if any training required. The ones who have perhaps taken the brunt of the “Media Outlet” hit are the newspapers. Shirky states, “Digital means of distributing words and images have robbed newspapers of the coherence they formally had.” It’s true for me that I get my “news” from Twitter first, followed by the Internet second, and television third. Newspaper? What’s that? Something that gets your hands dirty and that you use to clean windows.

Although it is true that its complexity still requires some advanced knowledge to work with, as the article “The World-Wide Web” states, “the incredible diversity of information available gives great credit to the creativity and ingenuity of information providers, and points to a very exciting future.” One can hardly wait.